How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and

witness. If he wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is his concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that.

A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became

more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer was listening. SØREN KIERKEGAARD

Hearing God in the Bible. Hearing God in dreams and visions. Hearing God in counsel and common sense. Hearing God in personal reflection. Hearing God in action.

The Bible is our primary source of revelation and the ultimate authority by which we weigh all other

while we are reading the Bible, it is reading us—discerning “the thoughts and intents”

“Scripture is God’s way of initiating a conversation; prayer is our response.

First, we discover that there are prayer prompts and conversation starters scattered on almost every page of the Bible (even if the conversation sometimes starts with “Lord, help me to understand this bit”!). Second, our prayers shift away from our personal priorities toward topics we might never

otherwise have addressed. The Lord is setting his own agenda for our prayer times. Third, we hear him speaking to us more clearly as we stop reading the Bible and start praying it instead.

If they are directional, we should also seek wise counsel.

I’m convinced that the main gift God wants to give some Christians is

common sense. It is no less spiritual to seek godly counsel than to receive a supernatural dream or an angelic visitation, and it may be far more helpful.

Most people today miss the voice of God not because it’s too strange but because it’s too familiar.

The “gentle whisper” of God sometimes comes to me as an idea or a mental impression during a time of quiet prayer, but more often it comes afterward, during a subsequent time of distraction.

Overthinking is not productive. Intensity and earnestness rarely attract the Holy Spirit.

Since God’s guidance can often come to me disguised as an ordinary thought or a whim, I tend to ask myself two questions before acting on any such impulse:

Is this like Jesus? If I obeyed this idea, would the resulting action reflect the character and purpose of Christ? Is it the sort of thing he would do? What’s the worst that could happen if I were to get this wrong? If the answer is, “Actually, it would be a disaster if I got this wrong,” the red lights start flashing! I

pause and pray. I ask advice from others. I take a little time to discern the best way forward. My general rule of thumb is to be wary of word...

“You are my friends if you do what I command.”[17]

In fact, the Latin word obedire, from which we get “obey,” literally means to “pay attention to, give ear,” or “listen to.”

When Mary the mother of Jesus told the servants at the wedding in Cana, “Do whatever he tells you,” it’s highly unlikely that she knew exactly what

her son was about to do.[18]

But she knew enough to ...

She understood that if the servants would simply serve, Jesus would somehow save the day. It’s not until we have done the last thing God asked of us that w...

This keeps us close to his side, obedient to his voice, walking “by fai...

Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth. Grant us ears to hear, eyes to see, wills to obey, hearts to love. CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Oh, will you pray? Stop now and pray, lest desire turn to feeling and feeling evaporate. AMY CARMICHAEL

Amy Carmichael teaches us that listening to God does not cloister us away from reality but rather propels us out

into wild adventures, abandoned to what she referred to as “Calvary Love.”

To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn’t already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge. FREDERICK BUECHNER, WISHFUL THINKING

Our greatest need and God’s greatest gift are the same thing: forgiveness of sins. And

But to ask for it, we must first admit that we need it.

“We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars,” says Shakespeare, “as if we were villains on necessity; . . . drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.”[3]

“Forgive us our debts,” because the Greek word opheilemata is a commercial term, not a religious one, denoting “something which is owed, something which is due, something which is a duty or an obligation to give or

to pay. In other words, it means a debt in the widest sense of the term.”[4] The word forgive has similar commercial connotations, literally meaning “to wipe the slate clean.” Try that with your bank manager, your mortgage lender, your credit-card provider: “To Whom It May Concern: My family and I appear to have borrowed far more than we can afford to repay. I am writing, therefore, to

ask you to erase from your hard drive all record of everything we currently owe. Forgive us our debts. Let’s call it quits. Yours faithfully, etc.” It’d be preposterous. Naive. Not the way ...

Perhaps when they prayed “forgive us our sins,” they remembered the story of the Prodigal Son, stumbling stinking up the road with his fistful of mixed motives and that flimsy apology tucked in his back pocket: “Father, I have sinned . . .” But before he could deliver it, he was hugged by the father, handed the credit card, welcomed home. It wasn’t the speech. It was never the speech. It was only ever that he had come.[5]

It doesn’t matter what you’ve said or done; what you’ve thought about saying or doing; where you’ve been or who you’ve been there with—there is more grace in God than sin in you.

“God never t...

forgiving us,” says Pope Francis; “we get tired of askin...

You cannot be too bad, too broken, or too boring for God’s unconditional love, only too proud to acknowledge how desperately you need it. Ask and you will receive. Take one step toward the Father and he’ll come running toward you....

Replay First, replay your day in as much detail as possible. Don’t just skim through its headline moments—the obvious events that featured in your calendar. Try also to recall the mundane in-between interactions, fleeting attitudes, and casual conversations that filled the cracks of your day, asking, Where was God

Night after night, you will marvel at the furtive ways God has blessed you, the frequency of his whispers, the consistency

of his presence, the lightness of his touch.

But God is not just in the nice stuff. He is also with us in “the darkest valley,” in our seasons of doubt, and even in our sin.[10]

“Unwelcome circumstances . . . are not gifts.

But they may contain a gift.”[11]

The prayer of Examen enables us to receive and un...

Repent As you replay your day in detail, rejoicing in the evidence of God’s blessings, you will also, inevitably, be reminded of actions, words, thoughts, and attitudes that were wrong. In the stillness of prayer, the Holy Spirit will often